Retroficiency In the News

2014 News

In this article for Electric Energy T&D, Retroficiency CEO Bennett Fisher highlights how data analytics enable a better understanding of how buildings consume energy, and why open data can be a game-changer in the energy efficiency sector.

Retroficiency CTO Bryan Long and VP of Marketing Mike Kaplan discuss new features of the enhanced Building Efficiency Intelligence platform, including the ability to marry non-energy-related data to its analytics. "Retroficiency can correlate energy-derived data points, like which customers have the greatest savings potential, to 'firmographic' data that helps indicate which customers have the highest propensity to act when they receive different incentive or rebate offers."

Retroficiency CEO Bennett Fisher discusses how benchmarks such as ENERGY STAR and EUI are just a starting point to compare building efficiency. Analytic-based solutions are the key to effectively target and prioritize buildings by energy savings potential.

Retroficiency has identified 176.4 GWh of cost-effective savings for Con Edison's building portfolio. Bennett Fisher of Retroficiency and Rebecca Craft of Con Edison discuss how Con Edison is using Retroficiency's analytics to enhance its demand management initiatives.

In this article for Fortnightly’s SPARK, Retroficiency CEO Bennett Fisher discusses how geo-targeting for efficiency with analytics is a better path to relieve a stressed power grid, as well as two actions that need to happen to ramp up these efforts.

CNBC features Retroficiency CEO Bennett Fisher along with other industry thought leaders to share perspectives on the EPA carbon regulation and what that means for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

"To achieve these carbon reduction goals, tomorrow’s grid will need to optimize energy usage every minute of every day based on the best resource available at that time – be it clean generation sources, load shifting solutions, or permanent reductions through energy efficiency," said Retroficiency CEO Bennett Fisher.

"We are applying disruptive analytics to an industry that doesn’t always move quickly and embrace change as efficiently as we would want it to. We wanted to move it faster and the genome project was our way to demonstrate visually how we could scale the industry even quicker." Retroficiency CEO Bennett Fisher

"The idea of the building genome was to take publicly available data, create energy models, which really means understanding how buildings use energy and can improve energy and do that at a massive scale," said Retroficiency CEO & Co-Founder Bennett Fisher during his interview on NECN.

“Think of a giant decision tree. If you know 10 or 15 data points about a building you can essentially infer the other 3,000 data points needed to create that energy model,” said Bennett Fisher, CEO & co-founder of Retroficiency, which specializes in energy analytics for buildings.

“We want the genome to be an open project,” CEO Bennett Fisher said. “We absolutely encourage others to provide their input on what cities we should do next, what other energy efficiency scenarios we should model, and any other data that can help us to make this project more inclusive and more useful.”

If more than 30,000 commercial buildings in New York City adjusted their thermostats just one degree upward in summer and one degree lower in winter, the savings would add up to $145 million dollars annually. The project is not meant to inform one-off undertakings, but rather to “show opportunities on a mass scale,” said Bennett Fisher, CEO and co-founder of Retroficiency.

"Being a central platform to drive efficiency savings is exactly what we’re going after," said Bennett Fisher, CEO of Retroficiency. "We can do the monitoring and verification and prove to the utility commission that savings are being realized."

Massachusetts is continuing to set the pace for energy efficiency innovation. Boston-based Retroficiency — a provider of proprietary software that focuses on building efficiency intelligence — was recently listed in Forbes as one of America’s Most Promising Companies. This recognition is due to Retroficiency’s innovative technology that helps building owners use energy more wisely.

A Better City conducted a study on virtual energy assessments with nine Boston buildings, in partnership with Retroficiency. The study found that plug loads represent a significant portion of energy use in commercial buildings and that tenant engagement and plug load reductions are currently under-incentivized by utilities and existing energy efficiency programs.

2013 News

"In 2013, we saw pilots across hundreds or thousands of buildings. In 2014, analytics will be applied to entire cities and states to transform efficiency forever." Retroficiency CEO and Co-Founder Bennett Fisher shares his perspectives on the industry.

"There's a huge opportunity in the government sector where there are very large portfolios of buildings and a very diverse set of data," said Retroficiency CEO and co-founder Bennett Fisher in an interview.

“Our tool is trying to automate as much as possible the entire process of an auditor collecting data while on site, using it to make calculations on potential energy savings measures and streamlining reporting measures,” said Retroficiency CEO Bennett Fisher.

Through the agreement, SEA will use Retroficiency's Building Efficiency Intelligence platform to deliver about 640 on-site energy audits at U.S. Army and Navy buildings in multiple regions around the world over the next year.

Smart Grid Today named Retroficiency's Rich Huntley as one of the 50 Smart Grid Pioneers of 2013! The list comprises the experts and risk-takers to whom Smart Grid Today turned to explain in detail the industry’s most newsworthy moves, insights, advances, setbacks and new concerns.

The energy-savings potential of a building is not equal across all buildings in a large portfolio, but buildings with the highest potential have an average energy-saving opportunity of 41 percent, according to a report from energy auditing software maker Retroficiency.

Utilities have installed more than 60 million smart meters in North America in the past decade. Now they have to figure out what to do with all the information the devices are generating. … Other vendors, like Boston-based Retroficiency Inc., have invented tools that make use of already available power-usage data to help customers cut their energy bills.

“We have to be more comprehensive when we evaluate buildings -- both in terms of measures and how combinations of measures fit within each decision-maker’s specific goals and thresholds. Any one building may have a huge incremental savings opportunity when all of the options are considered,” said Fisher.

It’s not easy deciding what buildings merit our energy efficiency dollars. In fact, the obvious choices may be the wrong choices. That’s the takeaway from a report issued today that is bound to stir up some discussion within the energy efficiency industry.

Buildings account more than 40% of energy consumption in the United States, and 30%-50% of that usage is routinely wasted. Despite this significant economic and environmental opportunity, building energy efficiency is vastly underfunded today. Government, utilities, technology vendors, energy service providers, software providers, and a host of other organizations are working to change this dynamic.

The measurement and verification (M&V) industry, which monitors energy consumption in buildings, is now moving toward real-time performance tracking, which is set to dominate the market. Companies such as Sefaira and Retroficiency are poised to democratize the market, replacing expensive energy modeling techniques and inadequate physics simulation engines.

Connecticut Light & Power's retro-commissioning program is looking to streamline from a two-year process to a one-year timeline, and one way to do so is to improve the initial overview with the use of detailed interval data analytics. (Energize Connecticut’s retro-commissioning program uses software from Retroficiency.)

Maine is achieving energy savings in many tried-and-true ways -- weatherization, fuel switching and installation of high efficiency light bulbs. But the state also is not afraid to explore the new and promising. Retroficiency is one company undertaking a pilot project.

It doesn't take much for building owners to enjoy a savings bonanza from energy efficiency, as the non-profit Carbon War Room explains in a report today. However, despite the potential, many private building owners miss out on the financial rewards of readily available technology.

When it comes to energy efficiency, small-to-medium-sized buildings are often the forgotten segment. On one end of the spectrum, there is significant excitement around innovative new products and enterprise-wide initiatives to save energy in large buildings. And on the other end in the residential segment, there is a continued emergence of programs tailored to changing consumer behavior, for example.

The US faces a bit of a math problem when it comes to making its buildings more energy efficient. If every energy auditor worked around the clock, it would take 22 years to analyze all buildings. Is there a way to speed the process – and allow auditors to eat and sleep too? Retroficiency sees big data and analytics as the solution.

There's been an interesting discussion recently about data analytics and software solutions that aim to improve the building energy-efficiency evaluation process. At the heart of this debate is what can be learned about a building without ever going on-site versus what can be gleaned from a traditional energy audit.

Increasing smart grid deployments are unlocking interval metering and energy efficiency programs for a tier of C&I buildings that historically were considered too small for them, Rich Huntley, VP of sales at Boston-based Retroficiency, told us recently in an exclusive interview.

Fisher said the technology can take building owners from the initial process of “pointing in the direction of energy measures that will have the biggest impact,” then can help automate the audit process itself, reducing by as much as 80 percent the time it takes to complete a full audit.

The best entrepreneurs don't pour over VC data like tea leaves, hoping to get in on the next investor fad. They look for opportunities and start building. And while VC's spent 2012 running scared from cleantech, that hasn't given pause to the sector's most talented individuals. … My favorite idea was a game (not yet live) by the Retroficiency team based on Sim City, to help Mayors and others make intelligent decisions about energy efficiency policy.

"You need data to make energy saving work," says Bennett Fisher, the CEO of the building efficiency startup Retroficiency. Thanks to the growth of smart sensors and the big data they produce—along with new companies that know how to crunch that information—energy users from huge factories down to individual households can track and reduce waste in a way that simply wasn’t possible just a few years ago.

So where's all of this sort-of "big" energy data headed? Boston-based Retroficiency has an idea. Not only is the startup using data analytics to provide building owners, utilities and energy service providers potential savings information about large portfolios of buildings. Retroficiency and others in this space could use the many data points at their disposal to identify the markets and even pricing for new technologies being sold into commercial spaces.

Enter Retroficiency. For many utilities, small commercial is enticing but frustrating. It requires a lot of boots on the ground. Ideally it requires segmentation. A corner grocery store is not the same as a clothing store. "It’s about giving them the tools to allow them to target the right small and medium businesses," said Fisher. "And it allows them to be more effective once they get in there."

Full-scale commercial energy audits are quite a bit different than the blower-door test and checking for leaks that a homeowner might receive. These massive evaluations can often take days to complete. Small businesses don’t have the ability to shut down for a few days so they can assess their energy use, which is why COSE chose Retroficiency for this particular project.

2012 News

“It’d take every auditor we have in the US 22 years to evaluate every commercial building,” says cofounder Bennett Fisher. Retroficiency’s Web-based software lets property owners enter information about a building’s size, occupancy hours, and usage (is it a warehouse or an office?), and get suggestions about energy efficiency measures that would have the greatest impact.

Since last spring, AT&T and The Exchange have been participating in the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Portfolio Energy RetroFit Challenge to study how big companies can apply energy efficiency retrofits across their entire building portfolios, at scale.

Commercial energy efficiency is a growing area of focus as utilities seek ways to meet and exceed new efficiency targets, manage demand without increasing capacity and deliver added value to customers. According to the Consortium of Energy Efficiency, U.S. utilities spent nearly $3 billion on commercial and industrial (C&I) efficiency programs in 2011, a number that has grown 26 percent per year since 2007.

Software analytics combined with rapid building modeling offer new approaches to analyzing building efficiency much more effectively. These approaches drive the two main types of energy analysis, virtual energy assessments and on-site energy audits.

Boston-based Retroficiency Inc. is betting that the company will benefit from the insight and personal connections of its new advisory board, which includes 2008 contender for the Democratic nomination for president Bill Richardson.

The Green Button initiative allows commercial and residential customers to download their electric utility data in a standardized format that can then be shared with third parties who can offer energy-saving services. If you really want to geek out, you can dig into the data yourself.

Across the country, commercial energy efficiency is a growing area of focus as utilities seek ways to achieve new efficiency targets, meet demand without increasing capacity and deliver value-added services to customers. According to the Consortium of Energy Efficiency, U.S. utilities spent nearly $3 billion on commercial and industrial (C&I) efficiency programs, a number that has grown 26 percent per year since 2007.

If the Empire State Building can save $4.4 million in energy costs on an annual basis via energy efficiency retrofitting, surely there’s some cash to be saved with other large commercial buildings? Liberty Property Trust has followed the Empire State’s lead on this front by taking measures to improve energy efficiency across 110 of its buildings across its nationwide portfolio. But the real estate investment trust wanted to be sure they’d left no green stone unturned, and recently contracted with Retroficiency to see if there was anything they’d missed.

One of the biggest challenges in Boston’s efforts to go green is simply deciding where to start. Really. An institution has hundreds of buildings in its portfolio and needs to determine which ones to invest in making more energy efficient. Where does it start?

It is estimated that 40% of US power consumption is attributed to buildings, and companies large and small are focusing on ways to reduce wasted energy in the places we live and work. With technological advances come new options for streamlining energy efficiency programs.

For our fourth annual roundup of promising social entrepreneurs, we asked readers to submit suggestions, narrowed them to 25 for-profit social enterprises, then asked readers to vote for their favorite. Over the past month, more than 7,500 readers cast their votes.

From 14 finalists presenting technology solutions at the CTSI Utility Technology Challenge in Santa Clara at TechConnect World, a top solution winner and three fund awardees were selected from a top tier pool of promising utility-focused clean tech solutions.

Energy efficiency continues to increase in importance for utilities, regulators and customers alike. On the residential side, consumers are being educated about energy-saving technologies and are engaging in friendly competition with their neighbors on who can reduce their bill the most.

Retroficiency, the Boston-based startup that crunches public and proprietary data to create building energy models at fractions of the cost of old-fashioned energy audits, says it can help on this front — and it just landed a big partner to try it out.

Politically, a map of America may show red and blue states. But environmentally, many of these states are trying to turn green — as indicated by new research published by the American Council for Energy-Efficient Economy. Despite being ranked in the bottom 10 on the ACEEE’s State Energy Efficiency Scorecard, Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming have improved their energy efficiency in some way in recent years, according to the ACEEE.

During his years at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, Bennett Fisher spent a summer interviewing more than 200 people in the commercial real estate industry, a sector he first encountered as portfolio manager with Pitcairn Properties.

Retroficiency has decided it will implement Green Button with its Virtual Energy Assessment (VEA) solution. This comes after the company analyzed one year of electric interval building data in 15-minute increments using the Green Button format.

On Wednesday, a Boston-based company called Retroficiency, which offers “virtual energy assessments” of commercial buildings to identify potential usage and cost savings, announced it had adopted the White House’s Green Button energy information publication standard in its product.

On Wednesday, the Green Button initiative announced a new round of participants, including energy management and efficiency companies Retroficiency, EnergyAi, Performance Systems Development, Snugg Home, Wattvision and Melon Power, as well as more large utilities.

While other cleantech markets continue to face challenges, the building energy efficiency market is marching onward and upward. Driving efficiency in our existing building stock is the nearest-term path to significantly reducing energy consumption. In fact, a recent Deutsche Bank report estimated $1 trillion in savings opportunities through building efficiency.

The pairing of the two technologies has been a boon for Retroficiency, which is also on a hiring spree. The company grew from 10 to 19 employees when it picked up the Nexamp energy efficiency division. It’s looking to add about six more employees, in positions like sales, web developer, and front-end and server-side engineers.

In my previous article, I discussed the overall opportunity energy analytics provides to help building owners, investors and service providers prioritize portfolios and more rapidly evaluate operational and retrofit measures.

As a private equity investor, Bennett Fisher spent 10 years buying and selling properties. He found that the 30-day escrow period was not enough time to properly assess the buildings' energy efficiency, unless buyers spent large sums on the process.

Recently, I caught up with a fellow MIT Sloan entrepreneur who chose to build his company in Boston with a local VC, Point Judith Capital, providing the funding. Bennett Fisher is the Founder and CEO of Retroficiency, a data analytics software company focused on the cleantech sector.

Early this year the Energy Information Administration, the analysis arm of the Department of Energy, quietly resumed an elaborate—and some say long overdue—energy audit of thousands of commercial buildings, compiling the information that property owners, green building certifiers and government officials use to make decisions about buildings.

There’s a tremendous opportunity to reduce energy consumption in commercial buildings, which currently account for more than 40 percent of the nation’s total energy use. According to Pike Research, energy efficiency projects could eventually save $40 billion in annual commercial building energy spending each year. However, at present investment rates, only a small part of that value will be captured.

According to research released today by Retroficiency, a Boston-based energy efficiency firm, your office building could be able to save as much as 43% of its annual energy costs by investing in energy efficiency. Then again, it may just be a waste of energy, literally.

The Boston-based startup already does building-side energy data analysis for customers like Jones Lang LaSalle and SAIC. Now it’s testing its utility-facing tools in pilots with Iberdrola USA, the arm of the Spanish utility that serves about 2.5 million customers in Maine and New York, as well as French power equipment giant Schneider Electric, according to CEO Bennett Fisher. Just what the two partners might be working on, he wouldn’t say.

Buildings are blamed for as much as 40% of U.S. energy consumption, and while green construction is on the rise, identifying the best ways to make an older building more efficient can be a tedious manual endeavor. Retroficiency, whose aim is to disrupt the energy efficiency market, eases the process with the help of extensive data sets and predictive analytics.

2011 News

Boston energy efficiency startup Retroficiency Inc. has raised $3.32 million in its first institutional fundraise, led by Point Judith Capital and angel investors. Along with the new funds, Retroficiency has a new acquisition, buying the energy efficiency division of Nexamp Inc. of North Andover.

Retroficiency, a startup out of MIT that uses software and big data to create energy retrofits for buildings, has raised a round of $3.2 million from Point Judith Capital and has acquired the energy efficiency division of Nexamp, called Clean Energy Solutions. The Boston-based startup already has backing from investors like World Energy Solutions, and has a working relationship with major property management firm Jones Lang Lasalle that will give it a chance to test the tech out in the real world.

Retroficiency is one of many startups developing software tools for making commercial buildings more energy-efficient. The Boston-based company today announced that it has raised $3.32 million in a series A round of funding from Point Judith Capital to build up its software and sales. It also acquired Clean Energy Solutions, the commercial efficiency operation of renewable energy project developer Nexamp.

Boston-based startup Retroficiency has been working on the building side of that equation with real estate data analytics software to better target cost-effective efficiency retrofits. On Wednesday it announced a $3.3 million series A round from Point Judith Capital, along with the acquisition of a company with software to parse power meter and utility data, giving it insight into both sides of the equation.

The company is announcing today that it has raised $3.3 million from Point Judith Capital and local angel investor, including Jill Preotle and Jean Hammond. As part of today's announcement, Retroficiency is filling out its executive team, and also acquiring the energy efficiency division of North Andover-based Nexamp, which is primarily a developer of solar power projects.

Boston based Retroficiency has just announced that they have raised $3.3 million in funding led by Point Judith Capital. As part of the transaction Retroficiency has also acquired the energy efficiency division (Clean Energy Solutions) of North Andover based Nexamp.

A Boston cleantech-software startup is making some noise today in a burgeoning market. Retroficiency announced it has raised $3.32 million in new financing led by Point Judith Capital. As part of the deal, the startup has acquired the energy efficiency division of Nexamp, a North Andover, MA-based solar power producer that is also backed by Point Judith.

An exciting tool is now available for those prospecting for profitable building retrofits. Analogous to giving a miner a GPS and the coordinates of a gold vein, the new Retroficiency software tool tells building owners, managers and service providers which building to target for retrofit.

Retroficiency, the startup that promises a "low-touch" software approach to picking the best and cheapest way to upgrade building energy efficiency, has just achieved a few significant milestones, announcing new customers including big energy services company SAIC, as well as a tally of 25 million square feet of commercial floor space having been evaluated by its software.

Boston-based Energy Analysis company Retroficiency has raised $800,000 in a funding round led by Nasdaq-listed energy management firm World Energy Solutions. The web-based service’s efficiency identification and qualification (EIQ) system was launched last week, the same time as the announcement of its funding round.

Retroficiency, a Boston, Massachusetts-based company, has declared the launch of the company and ushered in its energy efficiency identification and qualification (EIQ) platform. The new platform provides systematic evaluation of energy efficiency measures deployed in thousands of commercial buildings accurately, quickly and cost- effectively.

An MIT-incubated company has launched a software platform that analyzes the potential benefits of thousands of energy efficiency measures in buildings, on the same day it announced $800,000 in angel funding. Retroficiency, which was founded by CEO Bennett Fisher while he was a student at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has raised $800,000 of angel investment in a funding round led by Nasdaq-listed energy management firm World Energy Solutions.

A Boston startup that makes energy auditing software for the commercial buildings industry, Retroficiency, raised $800,000 in a seed round led by energy management services firm World Energy Solutions (NASDAQ: XWES), and joined by a number of angel investors including Jean Hammond and Jill Preotle (both early investors in ZipCar) the companies announced today.

Start-up Retroficiency today officially launched its service for streamlining efficiency projects in commercial buildings and said it has raised a seed round of funding. The Boston-based company said it has raised $800,000 from local angel investors and World Energy, which operates online auctions for bidding on energy supply contracts. Retroficiency's Web-based application is designed to quickly create a picture of a commercial building's energy profile and potential efficiency upgrades. It can be used by energy auditors to speed up creation of their reports or by buildings' facility managers to prioritize projects.

On Wednesday, the Boston-based startup announced an $800,000 angel round from investors including World Energy Solutions, as well as a working relationship with major property management firm Jones Lang Lasalle that will give it a chance to test the tech out in the real world. Retroficiency’s Software-as-a-Service (Saas) platform is designed to replace a lot of the manual and time-intensive work that energy services companies (ESCOs) and property owners must go through today to plan and execute efficiency retrofits, company CEO Bennett Fisher told me in an interview last week.

With a name like Retroficiency, you pretty much know what you’re getting. That’s saying a lot, given the obscurity of most startup names these days. You might gather that this company has to do with retrofitting and energy efficiency—and you’d be right. Boston-based Retroficiency provides software-as-a-service to help energy service companies, facility management firms, and commercial property owners evaluate energy-efficiency measures for their buildings.

You don't need as much original data as you think. That is the operative principle behind Retroficiency, a startup that emerged today with $800,000 in backing. The company has developed a software-as-a-service application that can analyze the efficiency of commercial office buildings and determine the most cost-effective repairs and retrofits.

Boston-based start-up Retroficiency has launched a Web-based service that it hopes will make in-person audits obsolete. Auditors currently spend hours inspecting buildings on foot before they have to write up minutely detailed reports — a slow and expensive process. The service Retroficiency launched Wednesday asks users to plug in basic data about the building, such as its age, size and occupancy.

Retroficiency Inc., a Boston startup that’s developed energy efficiency software, said it has raised $800,000 in a funding round led by Worcester, Mass.-based World Energy Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ: XWES). Retroficiency says it offers a web-based software platform for analyzing the benefits of energy efficiency measures at commercial buildings.

It’s still in the testing stages, but a software application developed by a startup called Retroficiency, based in Boston, seeks to radically simplify the sorts of energy-efficiency audits done by energy service companies (ESCOs) to calculate the return on upgrades to heating, cooling, lighting and other systems in commercial buildings.

Retroficiency Inc., a Boston startup that's developed energy efficiency software, said it has raised $800,000 in a funding round led by Worcester, Mass.-based World Energy Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ: XWES)

Worcester's World Energy Solutions is leading an $800,000 round of angel investment in a Cambridge-based energy audit software startup that launched today. World Energy teamed with a handful of other investors - including two investors who were some of the first to pour money into Zipcar — to support Retroficiency Inc.